Tahoma Literary Review: Issue 15 (Summer 2019)

By Tahoma Literary Review LLC

Tahoma LIteray Review is a literary journal with fiction, nonfiction, and poetry that you will want to share by people you want to meet. TLR is published three times a year. Our summer issue features award-winning nonfiction and poetry, as well as first sales from promising new writers. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tahoma Literary Review LLC
• Release date: Jul 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781733105217

Book preview

About This Issue

Welcome to our fifteenth issue. This marks the fifth anniversary for Tahoma Literary Review; we have been publishing new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry three times a year since 2014. A quick dive into our submissions database reveals that we’ve had the privilege of sharing 376 original works with you.

When Joe Ponepinto and Kelly Davio founded Tahoma Literary Review, they did so with some fundamental elements in mind. They wanted a magazine that was open to as many writing voices as possible, that compensated writers fairly, and that could nourish what we call the literary ecosystem: the network of writers, readers, editors, designers, and publishers who make sharing the written word possible.

Joe and Kelly started with those goals, and we—Yi Shun, Mare, Jim, and Ann—continue to pursue them. We remain committed to paying our contributors for their work. We pay those who make each issue possible: our associate editors, copy editor, design and layout editor, and cover artist (among others). We delight in heralding the continued accomplishments of past contributors and we remain committed to expanding the range of writers we attract to these pages, widening the spectrum of voices we present.

Of course, none of our efforts would be possible—or worthwhile—without someone reading these pages. We are grateful to you, our reader, for supporting TLR.

We are again honored to present an issue packed with memorable stories, essays, and poems. In this issue the elemental power of Nature feels especially prevalent. Characters consider their relationship with the natural world and the animals or plants within it (On Contrast, Crepuscular Behavior, Heretic, Hydrangea), while the sky above brings visions of flight through imagination, physical effort, and technology (Icarus, Hup, In the Skies Above Southwest Oklahoma, Gravity Haunted). Heat and fire also have a presence, as the desert sun and summer press down (A Good World, Sex Ed, Summer Solstice), or fire wreaks destruction (After Reading Reports from the California Wildfires Before My Father’s Overdose). Water courses through these pages, too, as a storm (Lake Reality) or a powerful current (Passive-Aggressive Flotsam Cross, Studies in Erosion).   

Our selections contain another shared element, too: human nature. Throughout our selections friends, relatives, loved ones and guardians reveal their struggles with each other and with themselves (Song of the South, Reprise, Origin Stories for the Turtle Lady, Because of Course: An Award-Winning Story).

This issue also includes three selections from writing contests with which we partner. First we have Grandma’s Letters from the Ooligan Press Write to Publish contest. Grandma’s Letters won in the short nonfiction category. You can learn about the contest and related writing conference here: ooligan.pdx.edu/events/writetopublish/contests/. The other two award winners come from the Intro Journal Award program. Each year the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) chooses outstanding works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry which then appear in participating literary journals. Visitation and Dear Anhedonia are our featured winners this year. For more information about the Intro Journal Award you can visit awpwriter.org/contests/intro_journals_project_overview.

Thanks again for picking up a copy of Tahoma Literary Review. We hope that our foundation of support, access, and community continue to serve for years to come. Don’t miss the issue’s closing section with comments from our contributors (including the cover artist), and join us on Facebook (facebook.com/TahomaLiteraryReview) or Twitter (@tahomareview) to share your thoughts.

Poetry

On Contrast

John A. Nieves

In the heat, sometimes, it is            easy

to forget. It is easy to            wipe the sweat and keep

talking, even while we are      panting, even

while every      syllable rediscovers

thirst. In the cold, things            are harder and like

gems, able to glint differently            at specific

angles. I remember walking across             this

field in February      with a thin crust

of fresh frost. I had            a loose tooth from a bad

fall and my fleece      was dirty. The crocuses

had just peeked            up and they believed

in the pale sun and progress. My boots      were wet

but my socks were dry. I knew      I was never

going back      south. The wind      sucked the fresh

powder a few inches off      the ground like the elegant

swish of a gown. Here, now,            on the humid porch

among the flies and talk      of plane tickets, I force

myself back to that      resolve. I will not      buy

the rot and darkness. I will not      let myself forget

how constant blooming      means constant death.

The promise of winter is the promise            of knowing

what the world will whisper            coolly in your ear,

what it will take      from your bones and your breath.

In the endless summer, though, the cost is      stealthy—decay

does not declare      itself. What is             softest, ripest,

is closest       to death.

Fiction

Crepuscular Behavior

Carolyn Oliver

The delivery truck that hit Lorenzo gave me two big breaks.

First, the company fired the truck driver, so I tipped off my roommate Max about the job opening, and he got the rest of my roommates to lay off about both Grant and my bounced rent check. Grant was a three-foot-long lizard, a black and white Argentinian tegu, and also the reason my check had bounced.

Second, Lorenzo being out of commission meant everyone in his department moved up a notch, at least until Lorenzo’s legs got unbroken and his right lung uncollapsed and he could see out of his left eye.

Like every other zoo I’ve worked at, this two-bit private Midwestern one-step-up-from-a-circus zoo ran on hierarchy so strict you’d think they were trying to impress the Vatican. You had to put in your time hauling beet pulp and hay, shoveling shit, assisting at vet calls, all while paying attention and hoping to make some sparkly observation that would impress a senior keeper and bump you up the promotion list. At least I was spared from endlessly directing visitors to the bathrooms; I only worked the early morning and late night shifts.

The morning after the accident, I passed my shovel to a bright-eyed, alarmingly young college intern and started a new rotation, one I actually wanted. I’m a herpetologist—an amateur herpetologist, Debbie the office manager loved to remind me, since I don’t have a college degree. I wouldn’t even get an interview at any of the major zoos, but in a county still aching from the last recession while it waited for the next one, there weren’t a lot of college grads to go around. After they finished their summer internships (a valuable line on the résumé, at least, and fodder for challenging situation you faced interview question), they skedaddled back to school faster than kids run when they hear the ice cream truck.

The last zoo—if you could call it that—where I worked closed with no notice; my boss disappeared with a few valuable animals and my chances of getting a reference. That’s why they started me here as a janitor, in the aquarium building. I was pretty glad to have a job, though. After a couple months the keepers began to trust me, allowing me to help out with feeding half dozen Adélie penguins, four nurse sharks, tropical fish restocked from a pet store an hour away, and a sea turtle, Polly, that hadn’t been laid in half a century.

I liked Polly. I learned her well enough to know when something was wrong. After the vet saved Polly’s eye, even Debbie had to admit that I’d been useful. But no good deed goes unpunished; they promoted me to assistant zookeeper in the small mammals department, where I wallowed for three years.

Then Lorenzo got hit by the truck and I was finally where I wanted to be. Officially, I was the assistant keeper of reptiles, amphibians, and birds, reporting to the interim head keeper, Brad, who happened to be the nephew of D. W. Breck, who owned the zoo. When Brad chose to show up, which wasn’t all that often, he’d spend hours in the office with Debbie going over reports. I hoped that when Lorenzo came back they’d shuffle Brad to some other department and let me stay, so I worked my ass off. This wasn’t a stepping-stone to a better position at the zoo; I liked Lorenzo fine, and wished him a speedy recovery. But I secretly planned, back then, to put away some money for a degree, and then get a job someday at a big zoo, a place with more animals, maybe even a komodo dragon.

I never got over my dinosaur obsession, or my first lizard, an iguana named Beagle. My mom got him for me when I was ten or eleven. He seemed small and manageable, but we didn’t know anything about the kind of light he needed, and before the year was out his bones went soft and he died. Unlike my mother, he never complained. That’s the thing about reptiles: they don’t expect anything from you, and they offer nothing in return, most of the time.

After Beagle, I kept to reptiles in books and on field trips, when my mom settled long enough to enroll me in school. It was years later, when I was crawling out of a dark hole, that I realized I could find jobs where I’d get to be around the scaly beasts I’d loved as a kid. While I was in mammal purgatory, I kept tabs on the zoo reptiles and amphibians unofficially, coming in a little early or staying late to take notes on my favorites, like the python, Gerald, and the blue poison dart frogs. Now that I’d been promoted, it was my privilege to keep them safe.

The downside of the promotion: birds.

Now, unlike everyone else who saw Jurassic Park the summer before Lorenzo got hit by the truck, I’d already read about bird evolution. I said I love dinosaurs, and that’s the truth, but I do not love that birds are related to them. You ever see a bird up close, or watch one of those David Attenborough documentaries on a big TV? The leathery legs, the gripping claws, those eyes that flick from side to side—those I’m used to in my reptiles. But cover a reptile with feathers—pretty or fluffy—and it looks like a costume, like something not quite at peace with its nature. Not to mention the flying. I don’t like things I can’t see coming.

Sure, ninety-five percent of the time if you leave them alone they’ll extend the same courtesy to you, but that five percent comes into focus real quick when you work with animals for a living.

I didn’t mind Brutus, the crotchety bald eagle; he was a real jerk if you paid him any attention, so I ignored him when I passed by his cage, only sneaking a look inside if I was pretty sure he wouldn’t notice. I didn’t like the brown ducks that swarmed me whenever I went to feed the pair of cranes, or Dollface, the insane free-ranging peacock, who used to preen in my path when I needed to move cartloads of supplies, especially when it was blistering hot or pouring rain. Worst of all was the aviary. The few times I got roped into picking up extra shifts I tried to arrange my visits for after sundown, but even then chances were fifty-fifty that I’d be washing bird shit out of my uniform before I staggered into bed. Those little fuckers were annoyances I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with, but they were the price for the pleasure of working with animals I knew and liked, the snakes and the frogs and the lizards.

Laila, though. She was something else.

Rochelle! Debbie yelled at me as I was picking up the previous shift’s notes the first day after the accident. Make sure you see the cassowary at least three times today. And type up your report—Lorenzo wants someone to bring it to him in the hospital. Her voice was sticky-sweet and slow, like molasses, and I was afraid I was liable to drown in it someday if I didn’t pay attention. She knew just about everyone in the county, and meddling was her idea of entertainment. I grimaced into the folder I was reading, but managed a bright Sure thing! before I headed out on my rounds.

In the six months Laila had lived at the zoo, I’d only seen her a couple times. The first was when they called all hands on deck during a surprise blizzard in early March, and a few of us slogged to the paddocks in the northwest corner, farthest away from the main entrance. Lorenzo and I shoveled a path to the cassowary’s building, tossing the snow against the chain link fence, which was covered in green plastic to prevent visitors from peering inside at old D. W. Breck’s latest investment. The bird was under wraps until her big debut in the summer.

Want to come in for a minute? Lorenzo asked when we got to the door.

I nodded, happy to take a break from freezing my ass off.

Usually considered temporary lodging for animals in quarantine or rehabilitation, the concrete building had all the charm of a cell. The cassowary had been in there for almost three months. Behind the